Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the back-cover marketing spin for this book, McGill-Queen's University Press declares that it is "a brilliant history of a turbulent time and place."Publishers should avoid making such rash and vexatious statements, as hyperbole can simultaneously raise readers' expectations and put them off.Notwithstanding these initial frustrations I did enjoy Empire Within.It is a very good book with strong arguments and information aplenty.It is well-presented and author Sean Mills writes with élan and captures the excitement of Montréal and Québec in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The book's eight chapters (between 20 and 25 pages a piece) are well structured and manage to combine an analytical approach with an overall chronological narrative that builds to a climax in the strikes or, as Mills argues, "uprising" of May 1972 (202).Moreover, a wide variety of sources in French and English is well-documented in the abundant endnotes section and the bibliography.The book contains seven plates of useful and nicely-annotated photographs after page 84, but unfortunately no maps are provided.Mills gives a good geographic description of Montréal c. 1960, but if the book is reprinted, maps of Montréal and the province of Québec must be added.The index could use improvement too.It is a mere five pages and omits many key terms and concepts such as "colonialism," "empire," "imperialism" (with subsections for British, French, American and Québecois imperialism), "decolonization theory," "education," "Marxism-Leninism," "New Left," "Third World," and "postcolonialism."What is more, entries for organizations like the "Confédération des syndicats nationaux" should be followed immediately by the acronym used in the text (CSN) -and as listed on the abbreviations page.The main objective of Empire Within is to break analytical or heuristic boundaries and situate the ideas and practices of Montréal's political radicalism c. 1963-73 in
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".